America’s Family Caregiver Award 2010
November 23, 2010
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Joyce Scott is the winner of 2010 national Family Caregiver of the Year Award. Leann Reynolds is President of Homewatch CareGivers. Joyce says what being named the Family Caregiver of the Year for 2010 means to her, describes her experience with family caregiving, and explains how it began. She talks about her family’s tradition of family caregiving. She describes the problems of the people for whom she is family caregiver and others for whom she also provides care. Leann talks about her own experience with family caregiving. She describes what the Family Caregiver of the Year award brings to Joyce. She says how she personally became involved with award, describes its history, explains who is eligible, how people are nominated, and how the award’s winners are selected. They both say what makes the sun shine for them. They discuss the most important challenges for and needs of family caregivers and say how help for family caregivers should be expanded, enhanced and provided.
Family Caregivers Unite!
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Family caregivers are the people who provide care to partners, parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors and even co-workers. They are the people who provide care when everyone else has gone home. They are the people who organize the functioning of the home for the person with special needs, and for the family as a whole. They are the coordinators of care, the managers of appointments, the preventers of loneliness, and the makers of decisions even to the point of Power of Attorney. And they are so often people who themselves are burdened with their own health challenges and who may be in only marginally better health than the persons to whom they are providing family caregiving.
Dr. Gordon Atherley
Dr Gordon Atherley holds the British equivalent of the Canadian PhD and MD degrees, and LLD, Honoris Causa, from Canada’s Simon Fraser University. His awards include Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK. His medical specialties are occupational medicine and public health.
As first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the Canadian equivalent of the US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, he led the creation of Canada’s electronic information service in occupational health and safety, now used in more than 40 countries.
In academia, he held senior, tenured, full-time positions, including departmental chair, in university faculties of physics, engineering, and medicine. He is the author of a textbook and numerous articles and publications.
Since retiring from medical practice, he’s built up Greyhead Associates, which critically researches the safety, effectiveness and fairness of health services for persons with special needs.
Through Virtual Care International, a company of which he’s President, he’s involved in providing sensible technology to family caregivers to help them with their responsibilities, workloads, and concerns.
Now an activist, he urges family caregivers to unite because, more and more, it’s not just their families who depend on them, it’s also the healthcare system as a whole, as it struggles to meet more and more needs of more and more people.
